We can only assume it was a trau­mat­ic day for one unsus­pect­ing moose.

The moose in ques­tion, a 2‑year-old city girl, start­ed her Fri­day like any oth­er day: Wak­ing up, brush­ing the sleep out of her eyes and run­ning into traf­fic on the way to work. And by this, we mean cross­ing six lanes of rush hour traf­fic in Col­orado Springs. What can we say? She had places to be and peo­ple to see.

Our lead­ing lady made her way over to Palmer Park, a pop­u­lar one for peo­ple and pets (she must have heard that Ele­va­tion Out­doors Mag­a­zine named it the “Best Urban Park in its Best of Rock­ies” in 2017). She mean­dered about the heavy brush, tak­ing in the beau­ti­ful scenery and enjoy­ing some nice fall air.

She was com­plete­ly unaware that Col­orado Parks and Wildlife offi­cers were fol­low­ing close­ly behind, armed with a tran­quil­iz­er gun and the smart­phones they used to exhaus­tive­ly doc­u­ment her adven­ture via pho­tos, videos and tweets.

After unknow­ing­ly — yet still suc­cess­ful­ly — evad­ing cap­ture for two hours, our moose’s luck final­ly ran out. Last thing she remem­bered, some­thing pricked her body and her eye­lids grew heavy. She’d been tran­quil­ized, or “tran­qued,” as the kids like to call it.

While she dozed, offi­cers quick­ly mois­tur­ized her eyes. Even they rec­og­nize the ben­e­fits of a good skin­care regimen.

“When bears and moose and oth­er ani­mals are tran­quil­ized, they can’t blink and self-mois­tur­ize their eyes,” CPW wrote on Twit­ter. “To pre­vent them from dry­ing out while sedat­ed, we rub a mois­tur­iz­er in their eyes.”

The offi­cers — 10 of them! — picked up our passed-out moose and car­ried her away to a trail­er, where they gave her an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tag. Then, a ter­res­tri­al biol­o­gist gave our moose med­ica­tion to reverse the effects of the tranquilizer.

Our hero­ine awoke in an unfa­mil­iar place with an unfa­mil­iar ear­ring. She could see her mov­ing prison was mak­ing its way toward the moun­tains west of the Springs. Sud­den­ly, it stopped. She looked around and real­ized she was in a marsh with a pond nearby.

At last, the bars of her cage were opened and our moose ran straight toward the pond. After all of the day’s activ­i­ties, she could real­ly go for a bath. (Editor’s note: Our lead­ing lady got to enjoy a love­ly bath at the end of her saga, this poor bull moose was forced to take a show­er instead.)

She looked around at her new sur­round­ings. There may not have been any bustling cars around her, but there were plen­ty of wil­lows to munch on. Hey, who knows? This might just make a nice new home.

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